Acute hospital sites in Lanarkshire, as well as GP surgeries, dental practices and other primary care centres around the country have been affected by the ransomware attack on IT networks, which also disrupted health services in England.

Ms Robison told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “This is a huge international cyber attack affecting companies who have the highest level of security within their IT systems.

“We have good security within our IT systems but this has been a major, major attack but I can absolutely assure you and the public that any lessons that can be learned from this incident will be learned.”

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The Health Secretary said work had been carried out throughout the night to get systems in Scotland back up and running, and stressed that the incident had not impacted on patient safety or confidentiality.

She said: “We’re very much into recovery phase now with a lot of work going on to get systems back up and running.

“On the GP systems, which of course were the main problem across our health boards, work is going on and there’s a level of confidence that many will be back up and running before GP surgeries reopen on Monday morning.

“Lanarkshire has been more affected in terms of its acute hospitals. The manual systems have worked safely and patients haven’t been negatively impacted by that and it’s important to stress that.

“People have worked overnight with IT suppliers in Lanarkshire and the intention today is to begin to start testing those IT systems and to gradually and safely try to bring those back on over the course of the weekend.

“I would stress again that through all of this there has been no breach to patient confidentiality that has been detected to date so patients should be reassured by that.”

She emphasised there had been no impact on the majority of the out of hours systems across Scotland, with NHS 24 working as normal along with the Scottish Ambulance Service, where the only issue had been with desktop PCs that were non patient facing.

Ms Robison said: “All the other parts of the system that people would use over the weekend are working as normal.”

Meanwhile Home Secretary Amber Rudd will chair a COBRA meeting at 2.30pm today at Whitehall.

Ms Rudd told BBC Breakfast she could not confirm that all NHS files are backed up.

She said: “I hope the answer is yes, that is the instructions that everybody has received in the past. That is good cyber defence, but I expect, and we will find out over the next few days if there are any holes in that.”

There may be lessons to learn from this but the most important thing now is to disrupt the attack, let’s come back to afterwards whether there are lessons to be learned.”

She later told Sky News: “It is disappointing that they have been running Windows XP – I know that the Secretary of State for Health has instructed them not to and most have moved off it.”

“Where the patient data has been properly backed up, which has been in most cases, work can continue as normal because the patient data can be downloaded and people can continue with their work.”

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